W LINCOLN NEIGER

We also discovered another way we could relieve the tutors' struggle with time and resources: grouping students by subject rather than grade. We found this through a co-creative exercise that allowed us to play with the arrangement of program rooms. This solution offered multiple benefits: older students could confirm their abilities through the practice of teaching, prodded to help through the new incentives program; the tutor could teach to a group of students studying similar subjects much like a classroom, meeting individually with students only when necessary; and the physical set up of this grouping method actually left more space at the each of the locations, freeing up room for more students should the program need to grow.

We formatted our final meeting as if we were all students at one of the Savannah ASP locations. We began "class" with some light stretching and body movement to clear our minds.

Our fourth and final workshop, Co-Creative Implementation, was an opportunity for us to finalize a few of our solutions with the Savannah ASP staff and discuss steps for implementing these solutions. By this point, we were all very comfortable with each other. One of the side affects of this was that some members of the group would often put down each other's ideas. To help avoid excessively negative feedback, we used the group's idea for an incentives chart to track positive contribution.

We did a NUF Test to judge the newness, usefulness, and feasibility of our ideas.

Our third workshop, Co-Creative Reflection, allowed us to propose a refined list of solutions and discuss each solution's feasibility and financial viability using a NUF test. This gave us a list of realistic, prioritized solutions to take into our next workshop.

We had sensed some apprehension between the administration and tutors during our first session, and wanted all participants to feel they could be as forward as the wanted during these workshops. So we decided to split the group into two teams: one for the administration, another for the tutors. This would allow each participant to comfortably discuss any areas of interest in our research and brainstorm tentative solutions. After regrouping, we discussed each team's ideas and expanded on those they found most interesting.

By affinitizing our research findings, we unexpectedly created a sort of problem map. This map helped us identify the program’s major issues and develop deep insights associated with the complex relationships among the stakeholders of the service. We found that many of the issues arose from breakdowns in communication among adults,  all of which eventually contributed to poor conditions for the students.

We noticed that through the variation across the locations, one thing was consistent: the kids spent a lot of time waiting. Beyond the kids' natural avoidance of homework, this was largely a result of the tutors' habit of helping students on an individual basis.

It became apparent that the children alone were not Savannah ASP’s primary stakeholders; the children’s parents were equally as important, as they make the decision to send their child to Savannah ASP and pay the program fee.

Kids: Where y'all's instruments? Y'all here to sing or what?

Visiting the Savannah ASP locations was a ton of fun. The kids were either animated and insatiably curious in what we were doing, or comically dismissive of our presence. It was a breeze getting them to open up about their experience.

We performed a SWOT Analysis as a group to guide our conversation. We learned that the program employees' largest concerns centered on staffing, volunteers, resources, and student transportation. Knowing the bipolarity of SWOTs can result in feelings of defeat, denial, and resentment, I crafted a simple tool to help us find the light in some of the program's heavier issues. This allowed us to end our first session on a positive note, while still collecting the information we needed to move forward.

We got right to work: we planned four co-creation workshops with the Savannah ASP administrative staff, the head of the Savannah Parks & Recreation Department (as the program sat under his charge), and a few of the program's tutors. Each would have a particular focus to help us reach our goals.

Goldmine! Turns out the former-locker-room-made-public-offices housed the Savannah After School Program (Savannah ASP,) whose director responded with an enthusiastic yes when asked if our team could help them improve their elementary homework help services.

This was one of my most fulfilling projects during my design education, regardless of the lack of tangible deliverables it produced. The value lied in helping this team uncover many of its root problems and facilitating the conversation to allow them to come to their own solutions through co-creation. This allowed us to feel better about leaving the Savannah ASP team to implement the solutions, as they could claim ownership of them. The Savannah ASP project was a pivotal point in my learning, ultimately leading to my dreams of working professionally within design and public services.